Background: Fountain Place Apartments in Bartow, Florida (Google Maps). Insets (from left to right): Jeffrey Blevins and David Morris (Polk County Sheriff”s Office).
In central Florida, an unsettling event unfolded as a man in the midst of a phone call with his mother was fatally shot by his neighbor from upstairs, according to authorities.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office has charged 48-year-old David Richard Morris with second-degree murder without premeditation and discharging a firearm in a residential area. The victim, 56-year-old Jeffrey Blevins, was killed during the incident. Following Morris’ first court appearance on Sunday, the judge ordered he be held without bond.
On Thursday night, Blevins was outside of his first-floor residence at Fountain Place Apartments in Bartow, Florida, where he lived with his sister, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said during a Monday press conference. Blevins was smoking a cigarette and speaking to his mother on the phone.
The tragic sequence of events began while Blevins was speaking to his mother on the phone. As they talked, she suddenly heard a noise that sounded like a fall. Concerned, she repeatedly called out to him, but received no response. Distressed, she ended the call and reached out to Blevins’ sister, urging her, “Go outside and find your brother. He’s fallen or something’s happened to him. He won’t talk to me.”
At approximately 11:20 p.m., the Bartow Police Department was alerted about a person “down” at the scene. Responding officers discovered Blevins’ lifeless body near his apartment, adjacent to the complex’s fitness center. Authorities noted the situation was immediately clear as a violent death.
Blevins had sustained a gunshot wound to the forehead, indicating he likely died instantaneously from the attack. The community remains shaken as they come to terms with the sudden and brutal act of violence.
Authorities — including the Polk County Sheriff’s Office — began investigating and learned that Blevins was known as being “non-confrontational” and “well-liked.” Investigators spoke with the victim’s neighbors, leading them to Morris’ door.
“He has been described to us as a conspiracy theorist,” Judd said of Morris, noting the suspect has lived with his mother his whole life. “He’s what we call a flat Earther. He still doesn’t believe the Earth is round. Well, the floor in the county jail is flat, anyway, and that’s where he is.”
“So we first interviewed him, and we asked him … ‘do you own a firearm?’ He says, ‘Yes, I own a nine millimeter handgun,’” Judd recounted. “Little did he know … is we had a nine millimeter casing from where our victim had been shot.”
Detectives continued to investigate, and they spoke with someone else who reportedly described Morris as a “suspicious guy that, when he was high on meth, would brag about his gun.” The sheriff described how investigators found a person possessing meth who told them they had given the drug to Morris in the past.
“Then we found another person who admitted to us, ‘well, this guy is, he’s kind of an irritating guy. Doesn’t cause a lot of problem, but he’s just, he’s just really strange,’” Judd added. Officers obtained a search warrant for Morris’ home and when they searched it, they found a gun with “the same exact casing, brand, and stamp as the murder casing.”
“David didn’t do a real good job cleaning the gun because we found evidence, blood evidence on the gun,” he continued. “And then we were real excited when we found that there was blood evidence on some shoes he had in his house, as well as a towel.”
“During the search, Morris refused to remain seated and interfered with detectives by yelling at them,” the sheriff’s office added, saying they arrested Morris at the time and booked him in the Polk County Jail on a charge of resisting. They also charged him with interfering with a traffic control device because “detectives recovered two street signs that Morris illegally possessed.”
Investigators learned that Morris “had been aggressive toward other tenants,” with one resident saying Morris had a confrontation with Blevins on the night before he was killed.
Bartow, Florida, is located about 45 miles east of Tampa, Florida.
